In overdue May, a Flossmoor teenager were given cash for his eighth-grade commencement from his father and different circle of relatives. The budding photographer purchased a $200 digicam, a Cannon PowerShot.
Soon after, George Floyd came about: a Black guy killed below the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis. Protests adopted. And looting. And destruction.
Days after, the 14-year-old’s father, who lives in South Shore, pondered the aftermath, searching for ingenious techniques to bond together with his son on this peculiar new global of pandemic and protests.
“I’d noticed after the riots that graffiti artists started tagging the board-ups, and other artists were using them as canvasses,” stated 47-year-old legal professional Christopher Slaughter.
“So I said, Zach, you’ve got this camera, let’s go ride around and take a look at this stuff,” Slaughter stated. “It was a chance to spend time together, talk about all that was going on.”
The end result? “Boarded Up Chicago: Storefront Images Days After The George Floyd Riots,” a photograph ebook via the daddy and son duo that comprises greater than 200 photographs of the wonder that artists made out of trauma.
“I’m into art, so it was pretty cool to see all the different art styles across the different city neighborhoods and compare like the themes on the South Side vs. themes on the North Side,” stated Zachary, a freshman at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. “It inspired me.”
Protests started after the cellphone-videoed killing of the handcuffed Floyd on Memorial Day. An officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight mins and 46 seconds till he died.
Protests that started peacefully grew violent as they unfurled around the country, the incident once more exposing racism that too frequently seeps into America’s policing. It has brought about a countrywide counting on race.
It was once the second one weekend after the riots calmed that the daddy and son drove across the town. For 12 hours, they zig-zagged from South Side to North Side, East Side to West.
“When we’d see something, I’d let him get out, take a few pictures and get back in. And we’d keep looking. We drove until the camera’s battery died that night. I had no idea there was so much art out there. I’d only seen what was in my South Side area,” Slaughter stated.
“And because we didn’t necessarily know where all the boarded-up businesses were in all these Chicago communities, a lot of our time was spent just driving.”
“Boarded Up Chicago: Storefront Images Days After the George Floyd Riots” (Bowker, June 2020, 218 pgs., $49.99), via father-and-son duo Christopher and Zachary Slaughter, is to be had on Amazon.Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
And a large number of time was once spent speaking, of police brutality, racism, of the way and why non violent protests devolve into anarchy.
“It’s pretty tragic how Black people are treated, especially since we built this country [on slave labor] and contribute a lot right now [as essential workers],” younger Zachary opined.
“It’s not just about George Floyd. This happens pretty often to Black people. George Floyd was just the last straw, and people wanted to take action behind it,” the teenager stated.
“I feel like our voices need to be heard. Protest is good. But there are some bad protests, like what’s happening in Kenosha right now. Some people use protests to do wrong.”
The teenager was once in fact regarding the Jacob Blake incident in Kenosha on Aug. 23.
Blake, a 29-year-old Black guy, was once shot seven occasions within the again via a white police officer. Peaceful protests have been adopted via destruction and looting. Then two protesters have been killed, allegedly via white 17-year-old vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who’s charged with homicide.
“Boarded Up Chicago” is 218 pages of the colourful, charming art work that sprouted on plywood boarding after that preliminary unrest in Chicago, which on no account has observed its finish.
